Green processing of seafood waste biomass towards blue economy

Abstract

Seafood production in required quantities is facing increasing pressures due to reasons such as rising population, increasing demand, overfishing, landing of by-catch, climate change-related biodiversity changes, extinction of species and others. At the same time, industrial production of value added fishery products generates significant amounts of nutrient-rich discards, besides voluminous amount of process effluents. These discards, by-catch and effluents are rich sources of nutrients, industrially important ingredients and also bio-energy. Developments in marine biotechnology offer novel eco- friendly green processes for bio-refining of discarded seafood portions. This article discusses potentials of green processing for the valorization of seafood discards and process effluents towards zero waste that can improve sustainable seafood supply chain. The green processes generally make use of bioconversions of discards to release components attached to food matrices, which are extracted by suitable downstream processing techniques. Algal biotechnology and biorefinery-based approaches have significant scope for commercial scale processing of seafood discards. Because of their functional nature, the isolated products can have valuable applications in health, therapeutic and industries in other fields. Green processing can encourage zero-waste seafood processing, environmental protection, blue economy and has potential to realize the Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs) of the United nations, particularly the SDG #12.3.